The story behind an insane computer-project

This July, it has been terribly warm here in Borås, Sweden, almost tropical climate.

Now, I have been terribly affected by this climate, so I obviously became insane.

So what happened really, well, I was sitting and having a Guinness and a malt, thinking of what to do.

Then I realized, I must build my self a computer, a proper one.

WTF, you probably Thinks, thats no strange with that, just take a Mobo, a Processor and some Graphics, and off you go.

Well, you could not be more wrong.

What I am going to build is a proper computer, based on pure ECL technology, like the old CRAY-1 (hense the name of the site), but I am not going to use any intergrated circuits as Samuel Cray did, but discrete bipolar technology, just plain transistors and resistors, nothing else, but loads of them, (hence the name of the site again).

I estimate that I will use about som 5-6000 transistors and the same amount of resistors, if this isn’t proof for insanity, I do not know what is.

Now I will update with schematics, simulations, thougts etc, when it happens, and at the end photos and other things.

There is three register A, B and Result.
the registers consist of one D Flip-Flop, per gate together with demultiplexers for selecting the function

The following operations is supported, it probably will be changed in the future:

CPYMA (copy from Data-bus to A)

CPYMB

CPYRM ( Copy Result to Data-bus)

CPYRA (Copy Result to A)

CPYRB

When you look at the schematics, it might be a Little bit strange, but using ECL has an advantage compared to other families, The complementary output is easily accessible, which means that I can use that to reduce the number of gates needed.

For example, if I need an 2-input AND-Gate, you will use two inverters on the input of a NOR-Gate, thus, using the inverted output off the previous gate, instead of the normal output, I can omitt the inverters, saving two gates (Three transistors per gate).

This is basically what will go on each ALU-Slice Circuit board, together with the Biasing Circuit (I am also playing with the Idea of having a common Bias Circuit for the whole computer).

Apart from the above, there will also be a separate PCB for Look-Ahead Carry, as well as status register and Zero detecting Circuit.

Embarking on this journey, i realised that it was som 25+years since I went to school, so I had to recap about ECL and other things, however it wasn’t that difficult anyway.

I began with designing the base Circuit a 2 input ECL-gate and did some simulations in LT-Spice.

I realized that the type of transistor I was going to use affected everything quite dramatically, so I started searching for a decent tranny to use.

It seems that I ends upp with something called BFR92P.

Simulating it in LT-Spice it seems that, at least in theory, I should be able to run this computer att 500 MHz.

Here is a screenshot of the simulation.

Obviously, I realise that I would not be able to run at this frequency, as well as the problem designing a Clock oscillator with several phases with discrete Components, and furthermore, my function-genny cant go that high, only 20 MHz, so that will be the target, for now.